MENA Dubai 2003 Abstract
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Kathleen Myambo and Walter Renner
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Human values are motivational constructs that explain an individual's preference of life goals, aims, as well as political and philosophical attitudes. Therefore, studying values can contribute substantially to research in sustainable development and peace. Values have been studied extensively by social psychologists and by cross-cultural psychologists. In these studies, human values were studied mostly by translating questionnaires from one language into another language. In the present research, the lexical method was used and an Arabic Dictionary was scanned systematically by two native-speakers of Arabic for nouns that represented personal and societal values. Several raters who were native-born speakers of Arabic reviewed the list. The list was then administered to 300 university students in Cairo, and the students were asked to rate the nouns on an 11-point scale, ranging from –5 to +5. The participants rated each concept as to how much they supported it or disapproved of it "as a personal guiding motive in (their) life." A factor analysis was then performed and culture dependent values were found that reflected the predominantly collectivist values of Arabic culture. Comparisons were then made to lexical data obtained in Austria and in Northern Sotho speaking people in South Africa. |
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